The students will be assessed during their study, covering academic and non-academic assessments as stated clearly in the university’s student regulation. Academic assessment is conducted using diagnostic, formative, and summative methods.
The course learning outcomes are built and improved by the teaching staff of the course in order to achieve the programme learning outcomes, including the expected knowledge, skills, attitudes, competencies, and habits of mind. Furthermore, the assessment criteria are built based on the course content, ensuring that suitable course outcomes are achieved. The criteria are generally used to assess students’ level through six major categories: remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate and create. Students’ assessment is made through classroom communication, assignments, laboratory activities, exams, projects, and thesis.
- Classroom communication, assignments, laboratory activities, and exams are designed to evaluate the simplest to the most complex levels of Bloom’s taxonomy, which are remembering, understanding, and applying (use a concept in a new situation or unprompted use of an abstraction).
- Projects, internship and thesis: are used to assess students’ level of applying (what they learned in the classroom into real-world situations in engineering practices), analyzing, evaluating, and creating knowledge and skills.
The curriculum of the Chemical Engineering program was designed to give students a solid science and engineering foundation with an emphasis on scientific research, practical skills, and a multidisciplinary approach. The assessment methods covering those objectives include:
- Midterm exams, final exams, quizzes, and home assignments assess the basic science and engineering knowledge of students;
- Lab performance evaluation assesses the practical skills of students;
- Project results assess the knowledge of students with emphasis on research skills, design skills and capability of conducting independent works;
- Finally, internship, pre-thesis, and thesis evaluation cover all objectives’ assessments.
The criteria for assessing student performance are explicitly and clearly stated in the assessment plan of each course syllabus. Students and teaching staff can find everything related to the course specification and assessment criteria by looking in the Program specification that was published on the School/Department website as well as apparently shown in each syllabus in the first session of the new class.
Example of assessment plan
| Assessment Type | Weightage (%) | Date of testing/ Submission |
| Assignment: In-class exercises/quizzes/ Homework exercises / project | 30 | Through the course |
| Midterm exam | 30 | Week 9 |
| Final exam | 40 | Week 17 |
| Total | 100 |
The assessment of each course is made by exams (midterm and final exams), lab performance, quizzes, homework, and project presentation. For example, the course assessment sample is illustrated in the above table.
As the mid-term and final exams are going to take place, the in-charge lecturer will clarify again the information about the exam content, exam format (types of questions and type of exam) and exam duration as well as providing answers to any other queries raised by the students. These actions will give the students sufficient time to prepare for the exams. Typically, the duration for the exam will be 60-120 minutes, which can be a closed-book or open-book exam. Teaching staff are responsible for composing the examination questions and sending them for approval. The lecturers are required to make new assessment questions every semester while assuring that the assessment content reflects its relation with the course learning outcomes and the taught lessons as described in the assessment plan developed by the lecturers. All the exam papers need to be approved by the Dean of school to assure its validity and reliability based on the assessment form and assessment content before examinations. Furthermore, the new forms of Midterm Test and Final Test also applied by teaching staff for the whole university with the systematic format for assessment plan and measuring the achieved learning outcomes consistently since Semester 1 of academic year 2021-2022.
Sample of Assessment types for helping students achieve the CLOs
| Assessment Type | CLO1 | CLO2 | CLO3 | CLO4 |
| In-class exercises/quizzes (10%) |
Qz1 60%Pass |
Qz6 60%Pass |
Qz15 60%Pass |
|
| Homework exercises / project (20%) |
HW2, project 50%Pass |
HW1, HW3, HW4, project 50%Pass |
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| Midterm exam (30%) | Q3 50%Pass |
Q1, Q2 50%Pass |
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| Final exam (40%) | Part I 50%Pass |
Part II.1,2 50%Pass |
Part II.3 50%Pass |
Note: %Pass: % students have scores greater than 50 out of 100.
Assessment rubrics and assessment schemes are made known to students before the exam by the lecturers to assure the assessment fairness. These particularly extend the use of assessment data for improvement constantly at the end of each semester.